My FIRST post.... All advice welcome (affiliate marketing question)

Hi,

Affiliate marketing or even Internet marketing is not as straightforward and simple as you appear to think although we do like most of the way you intend to go about it. However, what about those who buy your affiliate product, if indeed any do? Do you have any follow up offers, more and more expensive yet related products, to keep sending to your list as well as tons more free tips,videos,reports, newsletter or such like?

We assume that you are not yet an established Guru who only needs to send out an email to their huge mailing list to make thousands a day? So prepare yourself for results to maybe take longer than you assume they will take and keep adding fresh up to date information to your blog and under no account sell from that blog.

Instead build a growing list of readers with riveting content who will return again and again and eventually more and more might sign up especially if you also include an ethical free bribe gift to persuade them to do so?

At least you do realise the importance of list building which sadly too many others are not yet doing.

Wishing you success.

Stephen & Jennifer.

Yes and no ... but more "yes" than "no", so well done.

No; not at all. You've missed out one key part, I think? What's your traffic-generating plan going to be? You need traffic!

Publishing content just on your own site isn't really a traffic-generating plan. The only traffic that can ever bring you is, eventually, gradually, some search engine traffic, and (as you can see many people vouching for, in many other threads), that's about as poor as traffic can get, for affiliate marketing.

If you want your articles to produce traffic, you might be far better off having your articles published, additionally/subsequently - after securing their initial indexation-rights for your own site, in front of the already-targeted traffic you hope to attract. You need to take your content to its audience, because there's a limit to the benefit you can get from waiting for its audience to come to you. And it's very often a really low limit, too (especially if you're thinking of a search-engine "audience"!). This process of syndicating your content is often called "article marketing" and, if it helps/interest you, here's a quick, one-post overview of how it works.

I tend to advise people not to put much time, effort and energy into trying to attract "organic SERP's" traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (just because of all the high rankings I've got, incidentally, from article syndication to relevant sites) but I'd certainly hate to have to make a living from that traffic! Google rankings, in short, are usually not really much of a "traffic-generating plan" at all: that traffic's very poor quality and often temporary, too. Just reading this forum regularly will convince anyone of that.

As an article marketer myself, apart from sometimes the first word in an article's title, I don't let "keyword research" have anything to do with my articles at all. I need interested people - not search engines - to read them and "want to see more". Just my perspective.

Good luck!

overdoing it? definitely not. just remember imperfect action beats perfect non action anyday! You should start today... like right now